TPB

“Good night Steve. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” This came from a deep gravelly voice. The voice itself was disquieting, but the origin of the voice was a hundred-fold worse. What passed for a “good night” wish came from a thing that took the rough shape of a large dog. It was BLACK. There was no color to it, so much as a complete absence of light. There was a pair of lambent lights that were it’s eyes, but all else about his boss was darkness. 

Steve considered the sentiment. It was always the same. This made perhaps the five thousandth time he had heard his “boss” express this sentiment to him at the end of the evening. 

He thought it funny that the very first thing that Roy had ever said to him had been another quote from TPB. It was Vizzini’s proclamation about getting involved in a land war in Asia.

Steve thought that the Heck Hound’s obsession with one of the greatest movies from the eighties, possibly of all time, was strange. He did agree that it was an awesome pic, but his boss was literally a fiend from Hell. He remembered when first being confronted by it, that Roy had told him he had been around since before man huddled in caves in rightful fear of him.

He recalled an instance when he had been following/stalking someone and they went into a natural history museum. Steve had lost track of his target because he had come across a display that featured cave paintings from nearly forty thousand years in the past. What stopped him short was that one of the blurred images was surely a depiction of his boss Roy.

His boss was an entity from out of time and was not of this earth. Roy jokingly referred to himself as a Heck Hound, because he wasn’t into widespread evil so much as ensuring the coming of an individual destined to cause great upheaval and evil in the world.

The thing that was his boss; Steve didn’t like to use the term Master, had been known by many names across the millennia. Barghest, Black Dog, Yith Hound. Roy preferred Hell Hound, but since he had become obsessed with the lineage of a supposed figure of great import, he had been less about overall evil. So that is where “Heck Hound” came into play.

Steve was often left to his own devices. There had been times over the last several years of his service to Roy that Steve had not seen his boss for weeks at a time. He was tasked with looking over or after a particular individual. The boss was only concerned that the individual in question should thrive. This meant that he was free to pursue his avocation of culling the population.

He had been doing this for most of his life. He was quite good at it, and this was really the one thing that gave him pleasure. Strangely enough, it had been the pursuit of his “hobby” that had brought him to the attention of the Heck Hound. 

Steve had picked a target and had followed it for weeks. He had been in the final stages of culling the individual when it was brought to his attention that the individual in question was the progenitor that Roy had been so intent upon.

The Evil that was Steve’s boss had calmly announced to him that it was in fact “the end of him.”

Steve had asked what if he didn’t have to die. This had answered with the fact that he did. Of course Steve countered with what if he didn’t. This went on through several rotations like a crazy terrifying version of a looney tunes short. The Heck Hound had been about to put an end to it when Steve had blurted out “What if I serve you!” 

This had intrigued the ancient hoary creature that was his boss. It gave Steve the opportunity to point out that great villains always had a henchman of sorts. He had been told by Roy in no uncertain terms that he – Steve- was no Darth Vader.

Steve liked to think that he was somewhere between Renfield and the Sith Lord, or maybe even the Emperor. Whatever the case, he had gone into service for Roy and it had been an interesting few years so far. 

Over the last several years he had found that he did not seem to grow ill. He was the picture of health.

His culling had actually increased from what it was before. The only concern of course was that certain targets were off limits. One thing he had been doing of late was trying to pick targets to cull that would actually benefit the progenitor in some way or another. His latest endeavor in that respect had been an attractive Asian lady who was a coworker and apparently a strong competitor for a position at his place of employ. She had “disappeared” and the progenitor had been promoted to a more substantial position and place of power.

One thing that he had noticed over the past few years was that he was not losing his hair. This was unexpected because the men in his family had a history of early hair loss. Not only was he not losing his hair, it was even thicker than it had been for years before he met his boss. Steve suspected that maybe it had something to do with his close association with the thing that called itself Roy. 

He supposed that all in all, things could have gone much worse. When he encountered the Heck Hound in that blind alley more than five years ago, he was certain that he would not be leaving that darkened alley.

Luckily Steve had been able play on the fiend’s preoccupation with the classic eighties comedy, which is why nearly every evening ended with the creature telling him, “Good night Steve. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”